I once worked one summer as a laborer in a pipe epoxy powder-coating facility. The building was bigger than a football field. 40-60 foot long pipes were off-loa

I once worked one summer as a laborer in a pipe epoxy powder-coating facility. The building was bigger than a football field. 40-60 foot long pipes were off-loaded from trucks and manually sequestered through a series of ramps to an epoxy-powder oven. From there the painted (and very hot) pipe was manually moved to cooling racks to be cooled, tested, and was thence loaded onto trucks and shipped out. Moving the pipe required that we use a ~4-foot-long lever with two pegs at the end to manually roll the pipe from ramp to ramp. We had to stand right next to the hot pipe. The work required strength and endurance. The factory was located in riverside lowlands near the border of Louisiana and Texas. The daytime temperature varied from 80-100 degrees Fahrenheit with very high humidity. We sometimes were lucky enough to have a breeze blowing through the largely-open metal building structure. Nonetheless the heat from the oven and hot pipe was relentless. Most of us were uneducated laborers: I was the only one who had completed high school or attended college. They were a very funny group and my remembrance of their personal stories, ramblings and jokes still makes me smile. A week into the routine, a shift of us found ourselves in our morning break sitting under the stairs of the only AC-cooled room in the facility (where a small group of managers toiled) commiserating about our lives after working hours. To a man we were completely exhausted by evening and would go home, eat dinner, take a bath, collapse into bed and sleep until dawn. We weren't even watching TV! Slumped against the stairwell beams, I looked up to my right and suddenly noticed (for I must have seen it many times before) a salt table dispenser. It was full of salt tablets and had explicit instructions on it. It was like a "Hail Mary!" pass from the previous inhabitants of the factory telling us what to do. It described the symptoms we were displaying, how many salt tablets to take, and warned and gave explicit instructions of overdose. I read the instructions to them and said "this may be what we're missing." We all took two tablets and went back to work. What a dramatic shift followed! The next day when we got together again we compared notes. For the first time we had a normal evening, slept well, and woke refreshed and ready to work again. The difference in our energy level was like night and day. Today, decades later, people worry a great deal about getting too much salt. But let us remember that sometimes, in extreme heat and humidity, we may need extra salt.